Jim, it is a good idea. To be honest I catch myself wondering why I waste time lurking and posting on this thing. Especially while the place is swarmed with drama and threads about garbage that I can find on any other web site out there. Happy climbing to you!

He is obviously scared from using the killer sling and has been reborn.

He is just looking at things differently now.

If we knew Lollis reason for leaving maybe we could say she is leading by example.I will not bother her as to why, she is a friend but it is none of my business. She has her reasons and she is entitled.

T*R is gone and always comes squirming back and needs so much attention.
She now has it and I commend Chris as she has been high maintenance for the moderaters that dont exist.

Now any one thread may be a tipping point but, as I noted with my 'middle school' post, the place has sunk to a new low of late and I don't blame anyone for bailing given the recent level of discourse.

The best thing that has happened to me since I became completely focused on making my life full, rich, engaging and happy is that I have pretty much lost my time for and my inclination to watch the tempest in a teapot that is supertopo.

When I was young I was addicted to All My Children, a soap opera. Much of Supertopo is like a soap opera. In the midst of the drama are some great threads that have made my life a nicer place. Why the NEED for the drama as evidenced by so much of it here?

Me getting out and making my own life happen is far more fulfilling for me. I drop in here now and then and I love it and won't ever be posting a "I'm gone" thread, but if you get bent out of shape here I recommend some introspection as to why you have so much time to surf supertopo. Go out and make life a richer more fulfilling place for yourself. Find REAL boobs, why don'tcha?

Have you heard that tv taping ad that talks about letting others go land on Mars or invent things, buy this thing that salutes how important tv watching is? It makes me sad and kind of sick. The drama here is from the same part of human nature.

Good on you Donini. People who actually have lives can keep themselves entertained without the Taco . I'll miss your posts but hope you'll chime in from time to time if you see a thread worth posting to.

I find much of the non-climbing content here to be of interest. And that's partly because of the culture of climbers. I understand the language spoken here, I know much of the history of climbing (not that I was part of it), and therefore I find a lot in common with you all. Maybe the shared experience of climbing makes it worth discussing the off topics here.

Some of the debate, albeit a small fraction, is logical, rational, thought provoking. In an off-beat way, supertopo is a source of news for me.

It is too bad for all the drama.

Oftentimes you fekkers slay me with humor that most non-climbers would never get.

Visitors of the Museum for Prehistory in Eyzies-de-Tayac, France look at a Neanderthal man and child reconstruction

By SYDNEY LUPKIN
Jan. 22, 2013
A Harvard geneticist has raised eyebrows by declaring that scientists could make a Neanderthal clone baby if they had an "extremely adventurous female human" as a surrogate.

When geneticist George Church talked about cloning Neanderthals in his book and subsequent interview with Der Spiegel news weekly, it sounded like something out of Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" coming to life. But experts say that safety and ethical hang-ups mean the first Neanderthal birth in 30,000 years is probably fiction, too.

"I understand what George is saying. It's interesting. But I don't think it will ever happen," said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the NYU Center for Bioethics. "It lurches too close to exploitation. It rubs up too closely as starting to turn into bringing somebody into existence just as an object of other people's interest."

Fragments of Neanderthal DNA have been found in fossils throughout in Europe, and Church said they could be put together to create an embryo for implanting into a human surrogate.

Ideally, he said, people would be able to learn from Neanderthals, which are humans' closest extinct predecessors, because their enlarged craniums hint at different thought processes from humans. He said Neanderthals' presence could also create more genetic diversity, but Caplan said it's unclear whether it would be possible for humans to breed with Neanderthals.

Also, Caplan said, creating a human-like being in a lab for study could be exploitative.

The theoretical Neanderthal family (because Church told Der Spiegel he doesn't think a lone Neanderthal would have a good sense of identity without a cohort) would live under extreme scrutiny even if they didn't have to live within the confines of a lab, Caplan said. He compared the re-creation of Neanderthals to Frankenstein, noting that the fictional Victor Frankenstein created his monster to prove that he could do it. But the monster struggled with his own identity and dignity much like a modern-day Neanderthal family would.

Caplan said there's also insufficient knowledge about whether Neanderthals would be too aggressive to flourish in society or whether they would die of an extreme unforeseen allergy. He compared the latter to the way Europeans accidentally killed the Native Americans by giving them small pox.

And, of course, the United Nations banned human cloning in 2005, although the guidance wasn't as binding as a treaty, Caplan said. Some states have banned the practice as well, but a few, including California, allow it for research purposes.

"The reasoning behind that is because human cloning, to many, seems to violate the way in which people are created," Caplan said. "It makes people nervous to make someone from an existing person. There's a repugnance factor about that."

Whether a Neanderthal counts as "human" is also debatable if states or local laws specify a ban on "human cloning."

Ethics aside, cloning a Neanderthal would be a safety issue, said Ron Crystal, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

"Technically, putting together fragments of DNA is feasible," Crystal said. "Are we putting it together correctly? We know that one letter in the wrong place can be fatal."

Single-gene mistakes are possible when scientists are cloning an organism for which they have a model of completed DNA, Crystal said. But a Neanderthal clone would involve much more guesswork because scientists don't have any reference to tell them that they're about to make a fatal mistake.

"It's a problem for whether you're trying to put together a dinosaur or trying to put together a Neanderthal," Crystal said. "There's nothing to compare to. There's no gold standard."

Caplan added that it's possible many Neanderthal stillborns and Neanderthals born with extreme disabilities would precede a healthy Neanderthal baby.